Dance for Romance

From “The Gay Divorcee” (1934), two visions of the sublime. First: Fred Astaire getting ready to go out. He’s in a dressing gown, which he removes, slinging it behind his back to his butler. Singing all the while, he chooses one tie, rejects it, chooses another, moves to a mantelpiece at the side of the room, and halts. And then, in a single long take, he dances around a couch and right into his jacket, which is held by the butler, inserts a boutonnière, leaps over the couch, dances around it again, does three heel-clicking leaps, mounts a chair at the door, receives his bowler and umbrella—flipped by the butler—and goes out. Second: Astaire singing “Night and Day,” Cole Porter’s greatest song, and then leading Ginger Rogers, who has been resisting him, into a long dance of seduction, with heart-stopping episodes of aggression, temporary acquiescence, fierce pleading, and, finally, submission, all of it dramatized with dance, as dance. Film Forum screens “The Gay Divorcee” on Aug. 31 in the series “Astaire & Rogers: The Complete Works,” which runs through Sept. 14.